Americans worry about food in days of pandemic, job loss
With staggering job losses and business closings brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans are worried about empty refrigerators and barren cupboards.
Feeding America, the nation’s largest anti-hunger organization, has never handed out so much food so fast — 4.2 billion meals from March through October. The organization has seen a 60% average increase in food bank users during the pandemic; about 4 in 10 are first-timers.
An Associated Press analysis of Feeding America data from 181 food banks in its network found the organization has distributed nearly 57% more food in the third quarter of the year, compared with the same period in 2019.
Those fighting hunger say they’ve never seen anything like this in America, even during the recession of 2007-2009.
Across the country, cars line up for miles to wait for food handouts, each driver waiting hours for a box or bag of food. In New York, and other large cities, people stand, waiting for blocks on end.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Norman Butler and his girlfriend, Cheryl, arrived at 3 a.m. at a drive-through food bank in a suburban New Orleans sports stadium. They joined a pre-dawn procession of mothers with their kids, the elderly and folks like him — unemployed workers.
“A lot of people are in limbo,” he says. “The main thing we need is to get back to work.”
For communities of color, the pandemic has been a compound disaster with Blacks and Latinos reeling from disproportionately high rates of deaths, infections — and joblessness.
Unemployment surged among Latinos to 18.9% this spring, higher than any other racial and ethnic group, according to federal statistics.
Though it has since fallen, many are still struggling.
More than 1 in 5 Black and Latino adults with children said as of July 2020 they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat, according to a September report commissioned by the Food Research & Action Center. That was double the rate of white and Asian households. It also found that women, households with children and people of color are at greatest risk of hunger.
Abigail Leocadio, 34, who was brought to the U.S. from Mexico by her family when she was 7, works as a phlebotomist in a local lab. Her husband, a restaurant cook, was unemployed for months during the outbreak.
“It has been hard feeding all the kiddos daily,” Leocadio said outside the trailer after a recent delivery from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Phoenix. The family recently received two boxes from the charity, including canned tomatoes, dried beans, rice and breakfast cereal.
The food, she says, provides less than half of what her family eats in four weeks, but reduces their monthly bill to about $250.
While food banks have become critical during the pandemic, they’re just one path for combating hunger. For every meal from a food bank, a federal program called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps — provides nine.
Anti-hunger groups have lobbied Congress for a 15% increase in maximum food stamp benefits, A similar measure went a long way in digging the nation out of the Great Recession. A stimulus bill passed by the House this spring includes such a provision, but it has been bogged down in partisan squabbling.
More than 1 in 5 Black and Latino adults with children said as of July 2020 they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat.